


Time Enough

by scullyseviltwin



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Cuddling, M/M, Second Time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-22
Updated: 2013-10-22
Packaged: 2017-12-30 04:41:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1014216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scullyseviltwin/pseuds/scullyseviltwin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John’s hair is sticking up every which way, ruffled by sweat and Sherlock’s hands. The lines of his face have softened and retreated somewhat, rendering him years younger. There’s a bite mark on his sternum, tender and purple-pink, Sherlock’s incisors evident in the bruise. </p><p>Sherlock wants to slick his tongue over it, lick John awake.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Time Enough

**Author's Note:**

> A quick one shot that I loved and then hated... and then loved again and then loathed. I think I'm okay with it now?
> 
> Thanks to Allison for the beta and saying some spectacularly inappropriate things about our favorite army doctor.

He wakes in the early hours of the morning; pre-dawn. There’s no discernible color of the sky but the off-gray light that filters in skews the room and makes it appear as though they are surrounded by static. Sherlock shifts and flicks his eyes completely open, even the low glow from the windows stinging for a brief moment.

His mind is such a state, foggy from a proper night’s rest, is a bit slow on the uptake. The mound in front of him shifts and awareness dawns, slowly and pleasantly.

Knees drawn up and hands clutched together at his waist, he’s not spooning John, but in sleep his body has curled into him, seeking warmth and touch. It startles him for a moment, that he’s unconsciously made to embrace but the moment passes and settles and Sherlock yawns and smashes his face in the pillow briefly.

When he allows himself to look again, he’s stunned with how taken he is; this must be what it feels like to be charmed.

The doctor is on his side, legs skewed beneath the heavy down of the duvet. One arm is flung out, palm up, tender and open. John sleeps without a care, mouth slack and open, a bit of drool dried beneath his cheek. He’s the picture of comfort, in bed partner and surroundings. Sherlock smiles proudly and wonders how many partners beside whom John has been unable to find slumber. It’s humbling to know that John has found respite next to him.

Sherlock brings a finger up, traces the hefty curve of John’s shoulder, so lightly. 

He wants to watch as John struggles into the waking world, watch as his pupils focus and take in his surroundings. Not his bed, not his _room_ , and last night… it all comes back to him. Sherlock wishes desperately to watch the realization dawn on John’s face, as he shifts and accepts the tenderness of his thighs and biceps and backside. Muscles used daily, though not for this purpose; not for tender slip-slides and needy presses and more, more, _more_. 

Sherlock wishes to watch John catalogue his observations and turn his head to fully view who is beside him.

Sherlock wants this _desperately_.

He settles back onto the pillow, slicking his tongue against his upper teeth, wondering if he could extract himself to the loo to brush; he decides against it, the prospect of waking John unthinkable. It needs to happen naturally, organically, as it would any other morning. Sherlock needs to know how John wakes and how he sleeps, just as he knows how he eats and laughs and rages and, now, loves.

John spoke those words himself; Sherlock isn’t making brash assumptions.

Simply reminding himself of the solid, brilliant fact that his doctor is in love with him is heady and terrifying. His lids slide down over eyes, in a mingling sort of pleasure-pain that leaves his mind blank for one breathless second. He’s not really prepared for any of this at all and it’s so _thrilling_. 

John snuffles in sleep, says, “yeah,” and tumbles back into stasis.

Sherlock swallows and sighs, moving his body carefully closer to John. There’s heat there, radiating off of his naked skin and this close Sherlock’s own skins warms with it, his limbs crying to reach out and envelop what’s before him. He refrains, swallowing hard again, struggling to be content with looking his fill. 

John’s hair is sticking up every which way, ruffled by sweat and Sherlock’s hands. The lines of his face have softened and retreated somewhat, rendering him years younger. There’s a bite mark on his sternum, tender and purple-pink, Sherlock’s incisors evident in the bruise. 

Sherlock wants to slick his tongue over it, lick John awake.

Again, he refrains, scratching his nails on the bed in frustration. The sounds causes the left side of John’s face to twitch and his lips fall into a frown; his body wants to sleep through it but his mind is noting the oddity of sound, attempting to draw him awake. Beneath his lids, John’s eyes meander back and forth, left to right, right to left before they hover in the middle, shivering underneath fragile skin.

His left eye peeks open a fraction of a second before the right and Sherlock files that away with a thrill, biting the inside of his bottom lip from exclaiming, “oh!”

Through slits, John regards him placidly, but after ten seconds or so, his gaze widens a fraction and he snaps his lips closed, cheeks shading a pink that Sherlock can make out even in the low light.

Sherlock touches, can’t help it, feels the blood heating the skin beneath his fingertips.

Sherlock abhors the obvious but finds himself saying, “you’re awake.” His throat is still clogged with sleep and his voice is rough and low and sounds foreign to his ears. A million different things assault his mind as John rearranges himself in the waking world: color of skin and texture of eyelashes and morphing of mouth shape. John’s range of emotion is fascinating and vast in the seconds after he wakes and Sherlock greedily absorbs it all.

“Mmmph.” John mumbles grumpily and turns his mouth into the pillow, eyes darting away and Sherlock berates himself mentally; he shouldn’t have spoken. But then John turns back to him, his lips upturned just the slightest bit. “Too early.”

“For?”

“Being awake,” John huffs and twists beneath the covers, bringing the edge up to his chin and hunkering down, facing Sherlock now. His eyes are different in this light, nearly a muted violet and the detective bites his lips and searches for the proper color. “You never sleep so you don’t…” he yawns, stifling it beneath the sheet and emerges wearing a small smile. “Most of us need more than five hours.”

Sherlock feels shocked and silly, expecting anything else at all to have fallen from John’s lips. He gives a mumbled, “oh,” in return and watches John watch him, grey-blue, now, peeking around a swell of pillow. “I feel good,” John says honestly, without prompting and then severs their gaze, bites hard at his own lower lip.

Sherlock smiles, just a little, just enough and returns, “me too.”

“Sore,” John adds, once more meeting Sherlock’s unwavering eyes. “But… yeah, good.”

A laugh barks out of Sherlock; he presses his lips into a tight, thin line to stop the mirth that he feels from turning into a stupid grin. John just watches him in calm contentment. They don’t say anything for a time, but Sherlock stares at John, feeling his focus or sharp and unwavering; he looks his fill and then looks some more.

“You’re shit,” John says after the seconds have turned to minutes, “at pillow talk.”

Sherlock squints and considers. “Pillow talk?” he asks after a moment, voice finally coming around, smoother now.

“Happens in the morning, when you wake up with someone.” Sherlock’s face must be as blank as his mind is because John adds, a bit brashly, “after sex. This is me… trying.”

Sherlock has barely been able to properly file the pattern of freckles on John’s shoulder; there’s too much to process at the moment. He struggles with words, forcing his mind to stop racing. This is important, right now, speaking to John. He must give it the proper attention. “Oh, what did you want to talk about?”

John grins, closes his eyes and shakes his head. “I’m just… sorry, I was trying for… levity.”

Sherlock struggles to understand, but this isn’t an area in which he’s amassed a wealth of knowledge. _Sex_ , sex he certainly understands; urges and impulses and fluids and intercourse and fucking. But everything that comes with it, the wrenching feeling in his chest and desire to have as much of John as possible, to consume him entirely, he cannot comprehend. “Why?”

“Well,” John hides even more of his face in the pillow; his words sound garbled and broken. “You did, ehm, I should say, I did let you… bugger me last night.” Sherlock knows that John isn’t comfortable by the way his speech wavers at the end.

He considers for a moment: John’s choice of words, the way he’s ever so slightly embarrassed to be talking about this, something in which he’s so well-versed. “Bugger…”

“Wrong word,” John laughs, screws up his mouth in amused distaste. “Really, not the right word. Uhm. Just that, you’re the first to…”

“Oh!” Sherlock dawns, finally catching up. “I know that.”

“I know that you know that, it’s just…” John presses his lips together and sucks in a long breath. “Fuck, we should talk about this, yeah? If this was just us jumping into bed together that would be one thing but…”

“This is pillow talk, then?” Sherlock interrupts, sniffling as he settles himself more comfortably on the mound of cotton covered down. “Dreadfully boring.”

John rolls his eyes tremendously slowly, crossing his arms over his chest and staring at the cracks on the ceiling. “You’re an arse, you know that?” John steals a glance at him, quickly snapping his attention back to the ceiling when he sees that Sherlock is simply staring at him. “That’s fine then, really, just great. We don’t discuss it beforehand and then it all comes to a head-”

“You mean it all comes _to head_ ,” Sherlock supplies, mock seriously and delights in the slight flush of John’s cheeks.

His jaw works against a stupid grin, teeth grinding until his clever pink tongue darts out to wet his lips. “Cock jokes now, right, okay.”

Sherlock sets his tongue against his upper lip and watches John chuckle silently. “This is _me_ , trying now.”

He smiles with such affection that Sherlock stops breathing for a moment. “Yeah, definitely shit at pillow talk.”

Sherlock basks, basks in the warmth of the space they share against the cool air of the room, in John’s easy affection, in the tenderness of his limbs and knowing the cause of it. Sherlock longs to reach out and touch and spends a moment deciding where he would first like to lay him his palm. Shoulder, sternum, brow, hip, stomach…

When John stands, it snaps him from his reverie. “Where are you going?”

“The loo, I’ve got to-” he yawns once more and makes a sloppy motion of brushing one’s teeth. “And,” he says clumsily, still negotiating the tail end of his yawn, waves at his crotch. He gets two steps around the bed before the detective speaks, all lazy seduction. 

Sherlock shifts on the pillow. “You don’t want to get out of bed yet, you just said it’s too early.”

John’s face goes conspicuously blank before he shakes his head. Another smile blooms - he seems to be giving them more readily than usual - and then he sighs and hangs his head, mutters, “Christ.” Sherlock admires his nude backside and reaches a hand out to tap the side of the bed just vacated.

John sits, sighs, dares to glance at Sherlock over his shoulder. “I can’t believe you’re enticing me to come to bed. _You_ want to stay in bed...”

“If it makes it any less bizarre, I’m not attempting in any way to make you go back to sleep.”

John nods, twisting so his left leg is bent on the mattress. “That makes a bit more sense, yeah. Though I should have you know I think I need a bit more recovery time before anything approaching last night happens in the general vicinity of my arse.”

The way he delivers it, point blank without any humor, has Sherlock in stitches immediately. His chuckle turns after a moment into a full-bellied laugh and John watches on, amused. From his perch on the bed with his brows raised in surprise, he looks perfect and in need of debauching. It only makes Sherlock laugh harder, tossing himself onto his side, tangling himself in the bed clothes. 

John laughs too, eyes twinkling, lips pulled back into a full grin. “Seriously, be right back.”

He pads into the bathroom and closes the door quietly. Sherlock immediately places his hand on the bed, absorbing the warmth that John’s body impressed upon the sheets. He turns, shuffles, mashes his face into the pillow opposite his own, inhales deeply. It’s the lingering scent of John and Sherlock’s cock stirs at it, the recollection of what it felt like to be inside of the doctor, the positively _filthy_ sounds he had made.

He hears the toilet flush and the tap turn on and takes the moment to snuggle over into John’s side of the bed, lying in his scent, knowing he can’t physically wear it though wanting to try nonetheless. Sentiment; it takes him _hard_ , causes a burn in his chest and a lump in his throat. He would never admit to harboring such soft feelings and knows he doesn’t have to; his body will betray him.

Sherlock feels himself soften further when John reemerges, hand sifting through the back of his hair. He looks down at where Sherlock lays and raises an amused brow. “Care to move over?” 

Sherlock grins, shakes his head.

John licks his lips at the challenge and bullies his way back into his previous spot, hips and arse jostling Sherlock back on the mattress until they’re flush with one another, chest to back. “God, you’re long.” Sherlock’s chin digs into John’s shoulder when he nods.

“I waited until you woke up. I wanted to watch you wake up,” Sherlock says without preamble, resting his palm flat at John’s hip. He half-heartedly curses himself for doing just as he’d hoped he wouldn’t. Still, John relaxes beneath him, winding an arm back and around to rest against Sherlock’s thigh.

“That’s unbearably romantic, you know?”

Sherlock grumbles, “Shut up,” into John’s skin and nips at the spot where shoulder meets neck. 

John shouts at the slight pain, wriggles against Sherlock. “Almost too much, even for me.”

“Shut _up_ ,” Sherlock whines, nosing just behind the ear in front of him. He feels a chuckle rumble through John and opens his mouth against the skin beneath his lips. Sherlock takes his time nipping and suckling and tasting, smearing his mouth down the back of John’s neck as he strokes lovingly over his lower stomach, through the sparse hair there.

“A romantic and a tease,” John says in a rush of breath, angling his hips forwards in his neediness.

Taking the hint, Sherlock wraps his hand around John’s prick, jerking him lazily as he breathes into the column of his neck. “A tease, how dare you accuse me of such a thing?” His thumb drags slowly through the precome beaded at the tip, smears it along John’s length without the slightest bit of haste. “Aren’t I giving you what you want?”

“Fuck,” John breathes and tucks his chin against his chest. “Yes.”

“And last evening... didn’t I give you what you were begging for, then?” His words rumble out, vibrate against John’s skin. “You did beg, John, for me to fill you, for me to fuck you...” Sherlock removes his hand, spits in it and returns, twisting his palm faster along John’s length. 

John’s chest heaves and he hums to himself, unintelligible words.

Sherlock, hard between them, bucks against the crease of his arse hard, seeking the friction. “Tell me John, tell me...”

“Guh, god, you fuck me so… so, _please_ Sherlock, I’m going to come…” Sherlock sinks his teeth into the skin of John’s shoulder hard and feels warm wetness coat his fingers. John bucks and jerks beneath him, wordless sounds tearing from his throat. Sherlock pulls shakily back, uses John’s wetness to coat himself and strokes languidly as he shimmies back and up onto his knees. With an insistent hand he pushes John flat onto his back.

Two fingers find their way to John’s mouth where they’re sucked greedily in. With John’s tongue lapping at his fore and middle fingers Sherlock comes, silently, in hot spurts across a heaving chest. He wipes himself sloppily across John’s right pectoral as though that accomplishes anything at all and falls back in a heap against the pillows.

Carefully, John runs a finger through the mess on his front and shakes his head. “Jesus christ, you even feed your ego during sex,” he croaks, tossing an arm over his eyes.

Sherlock dabs at himself with a tissue and finding it unsatisfactory, sniffs and rolls from the bed. “You’re not surprised, surely.” He glances once more over at John, notes the splotchy patches of red fading across his chest, the slight pinkness from where Sherlock had sunk his teeth and the hair under his arms. There’s so _much_ , so much to discover.

It tickles him to the core that he’s fairly sure he’ll have ages and ages to learn it all. He watches as John slowly licks his lips and peeks one eye out from the curtain of his arms. “No, just reiterating that you’re an arse. Though… you’re the arse that I seem to have chosen so… really it’s on me.”

“Too right,” Sherlock says and scrubs a hand through his hair. “I’m having a shower.”

“Right, come all over me and take the first shower, dick.” but even as he grumbles.

“Who’s making cock jokes now?” Sherlock returns and at the sound of John’s startled laughter, saunters into the bathroom.

He turns, presses his forehead against the closed door and allows himself to go weak in the knees for a moment. It’s not a crisis or an overabundance of observances, it’s that he’s happy, really and truly, watery-limbed happy and he doesn’t know what to do with it. He brings his hand up to his mouth, licks the back of his fingers and tastes John, one last time.

Sherlock turns the shower on, hot, but before stepping in he pads back to the door, opens it a fraction. On the bed is John Watson, asleep, wearing a grin that quite matches Sherlock’s own. 

He wishes to measure the curve of it but steps into the shower instead. He has time enough for that later.


End file.
